News Release Archive - 2002

JOHN MILLER
Professor of economics at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and contributing editor for Dollars & Sense magazine, Miller said today: “The Bush administration is rounding up the usual suspects — conservative politicians, economists, business types, and even large donors — for a forum on why that pesky economy refuses to respond to Bush tax cuts and what to do about a federal budget now hemorrhaging red ink. Unfortunately, Tuesday’s economic gab fest is likely to shed little light on how to restore robust economic growth in a sluggish economy saddled with excess capacity of business capital, staggering levels of consumer debt, a teetering stock market, and record-setting levels of economic inequality. Abandoning what is left of Bush’s tax giveaway for the wealthy — which will be enacted too slowly to have any stimulative effect on the economy — and restoring much-needed infrastructure spending and social services would do far more to get the economy going again and put people to work than Bush’s economic program. But those ideas won’t make it onto Tuesday’s agenda sure to be filled with blather about how more giveaways to the rich and less government are the only way to get the economy going again. The economic policies made by and for people attending the conference are the problem, not the solution.”
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JULIANNE MALVEAUX
An economist and columnist, Malveaux said today: “The so-called economic summit lacks merit on its face. Most of those who will attend have paid to sit in the room. The ‘ordinary people’ who Mr. Bush will talk to have been carefully vetted to mute any criticism of Mr. Bush…. This is little more than a photo-op, a partisan infomercial. If Mr. Bush were serious about talking about the economy, he’d talk about the incredible disappearing surplus, about the layoffs that have taken place in the last few months, and about next steps in corporate governance. Instead of shaping a substantive discussion, though, Mr. Bush and his handlers have concentrated on image, having seemingly spent more time and thought designing an attractive and media-friendly backdrop for the summit than on the plight of the millions of Americans who have been hurt by the Bush economy. One million six hundred thousand fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Bush began his presidency. How many of them have been invited to the summit?”
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RICHARD B. DU BOFF
Professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College, Du Boff said today: “The Republicans are worried that the Bush administration is not speaking with a ‘strong economic voice’ these days: they fear that they are in trouble for the November elections and that the President may meet the same fate as his father in 2004. Why are they surprised? The President believes that the only things wrong with the economy can be fixed by tax cuts for the rich and eliminating regulations on business. Does he need a more commanding public figure to confirm that? Or does he realize that unemployment, stagnant real wages, and inadequate medical care threaten the well-being of tens of millions of Americans, and that state and local governments, which provide many of our public services, are financially squeezed and cutting back?”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 332-5055 or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

SCOTT RITTER
Ritter, who was a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, is available for limited interviews. When asked by the Institute for Public Accuracy if he would be willing to go to Iraq with members of Congress, Ritter said he would consider such an option. He said today: \”The offer by Iraq for members of Congress to go to Iraq is a positive one. Certainly, Congress doesn\’t do inspections, but there should be a dialogue between members of Congress and the Iraqis. The U.S. government response highlights the fact that it isn\’t interested in disarmament; it openly states that ousting Saddam Hussein is more important than ensuring that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqis are making it clear they want to play ball. The U.S. is currently president of the UN Security Council; but rather than pursuing the proposals from Iraq, it has sabotaged them….\” (On CNN on Sunday, former UNSCOM head Richard Butler claimed: \”When they [the Iraqis] threw UNSCOM out, we furnished a final report…\” But Ritter said today: \”UNSCOM was not thrown out in the end, rather Butler withdrew it to make way for the bombing campaign Desert Fox.\”) Ritter is the author of Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem Once and For All.

PHYLLIS BENNIS
Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader. She accompanied the first and only Congressional staff delegation to Iraq in 1999.
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KATHY KELLY
Coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness, which challenges the economic sanctions against Iraq, Kelly is one of seven people who have begun a 40-day fast, across from the U.S. mission to the UN, which will end on Sept. 11. Today marks the 57th anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima and 12 years of the U.S.-led embargo on Iraq. The anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki is on Friday.

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HOWARD ZINN
A widely noted historian who has authored numerous books including A People\’s History of the United States and the recent Terrorism and War, Zinn was a bombardier during World War II. He said today: \”The administration talks about hitting \’military targets\’ but that phrase is so loose that President Truman, after an atomic bomb obliterated the population of Hiroshima, said: \’The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.\’…. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan, because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that…. The administration is now planning for a massive bombing campaign on Iraq and we know that this will mean that more Iraqi children, women and men will die….\”
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PHILIP NOBILE
Nobile is the editor of the book Judgment at the Smithsonian, which reprinted the banned script of the Smithsonian\’s 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MARK WEISBROT
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Weisbrot wrote the article “Economists in Denial” in today’s Washington Post. He said this afternoon: “[Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill is visiting countries in the grip of serious economic and financial crisis: Argentina’s economy has collapsed, and Brazil is headed toward default on its debt. And this comes at the end of a long period of economic failure: over the last 20 years, the income of the average Latin American has barely grown — by 7 percent — as compared to 75 percent growth over the previous 20 years (1960-1980). In the United States, the failure has been distributional: despite considerable economic growth, the median wage here is barely above what it was 29 years ago. Granting fast-track authority to pursue more of the same polices is not going to help. It is time for policy-makers to ask some serious questions about what has gone wrong.”
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DAPHNE WYSHAM
The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal features an article headlined: “Enron Criminal Probe Focuses on Alleged Corruption Abroad.” The piece cites Wysham, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies and author of “Enron’s Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enron’s Globalization Game.” As detailed in the article, the Justice Department’s previously undisclosed inquiry into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by Enron examines Enron’s efforts to win foreign pipeline, power and water-privatization projects, some reaching as far back as the mid-1990s. Although Enron has declared bankruptcy for its domestic operations, much of its overseas operations remain intact, thanks to long-term financial backing from U.S. taxpayer-financed institutions, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Wysham said this afternoon: “These public agencies still have not been held accountable for their roles in Enron’s continued activity abroad, which is the real scandal here. In this era of globalization, public agencies are selling out public resources for the private gain of CEOs and their collaborators. Bribery and other forms of corruption and coercion are the rule, not the exception, in many development projects abroad. Enron is not just one rotten apple; the whole barrel of government-corporate collusion in development contracts is rotten, and is forcing developing countries to accept deals that are not in their, or our, long-term interest.”
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CECIL E. ROBERTS, via Doug Gibson
George W. Bush spoke at a celebration of the miners’ rescue in Pennsylvania today. Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America, pointed out a number of policies the administration has pursued that are harmful to the well-being of miners.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MIKE GRAVEL
Gravel, currently president of Direct Democracy and sponsor of the National Initiative for Democracy, was a noted critic of the Vietnam War while in the Senate. He entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. He said today: “This is a déjà vu of Tonkin and the evidence seems to be as flimsy. [Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William] Fulbright’s biggest regret, he would later say, was signing off on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. The incident was a lie about a supposed attack on U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, fabricated by the Johnson government to give legitimacy to the expansion of the Vietnam War. There seems to be a similar rush to a ‘Tonkin judgment’ in the Senate to give the Bush administration legitimacy for an attack on Iraq. A ‘War on Terror’ is a diffused type of Cold War, which is worldwide, even in Oklahoma and New York. To sustain the war fever the administration hawks need a hot war to sustain a national war mentality…”
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times is highly critical of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has just concluded two days of hearings on Iraq. The committee is playing a very different role than when the Senate panel aired dissenting perspectives during early years of the Vietnam War, the article says. “Transfixed with tactical issues, none of the senators on television in recent days would dream of acknowledging the present relevance of a statement made by Senator [Wayne] Morse a third of a century ago: ‘We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.’”
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WILLIAM HARTUNG
Senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute and co-author of “Axis of Influence: Behind the Bush Administration’s Missile Defense Program,” Hartung said today: “With House passage last week of the $10 billion ‘Cost of War Against Terrorism Authorization Act,’ Congress has signed off on more than $150 billion in new military spending in the first 19 months of the Bush administration. If, as suspected, these new funds are to be diverted to prepare for war against Iraq, the immense costs incurred so far by the Bush administration’s … open-ended ‘war on terrorism’ will be just the down payment on a massive buildup that could exceed the military spending binge of the Reagan era.”
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ROBERT BUZZANCO
Associate professor of history at the University of Houston, Buzzanco is author of Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. He said today: “It’s important to remember that while everyone talks of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed in 1964 by 98 to 2. Fulbright only held hearings after there was a people’s movement against the war. Congress rarely has the courage to do something on its own and debate is limited over the tactics of how to attack. Often what drives war is not what’s actually happening in Southeast Asia or the Mideast, but the perceived interests of some domestic groups.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee continues to hear testimony from the individuals it has selected, the following analysts are available for interviews:

PHYLLIS BENNIS
Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader. Her testimony was put in the Congressional Record on Wednesday; she was not asked to testify.
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KATHY KELLY
Coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness, a group which has challenged the economic sanctions against Iraq, Kelly has been to that country over a dozen times, most recently in June. She will be in New York City after 1 p.m. on Thursday.
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SCOTT RITTER
Ritter, who was a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, is the author of Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem Once and For All.
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HANS VON SPONECK
As a former UN Assistant Secretary General, Von Sponeck headed the UN “oil-for-food” program until he resigned two years ago in protest over the continued sanctions. He was in Iraq in July.
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JIM JENNINGS
President of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organization, Jennings has led medical and public health workshops in Iraqi hospitals since 1991, training 500 Iraqi doctors and nurses in child survival techniques. He said today: “Any new war with Iraq would only bring a fresh humanitarian catastrophe. We are still dealing with the devastating effects of the last war and the subsequent harsh embargo on vulnerable women, children, and the aged. Since the Gulf War, the death rate for children under age 5 in Iraq has risen from 56 per thousand to 131 per thousand. One in every eight Iraqi children dies before his or her first birthday. Sixty percent of mothers are anemic, and one child in three suffers from chronic malnutrition. The incidence of childhood cancer and leukemia has more than tripled in the Basra governorate…”
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RAHUL MAHAJAN
Mahajan is author of The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism and the forthcoming Desert Deception: Myths and Realities About the War on Iraq. Mahajan said today: “Myths impede discussion about Iraq. Myths like: The economic sanctions would be lifted if only Iraq had complied with the weapons inspectors. (The U.S. government repeatedly stated the sanctions would continue regardless.) Myths like: Inspectors are not in Iraq because Iraq kicked them out in December of 1998. (Actually they were withdrawn by UNSCOM head Richard Butler, just before the Desert Fox bombing campaign.) It was also under Butler’s watch that inspectors were used for espionage, something many have forgotten about. Also, the Pentagon continues to bomb Iraq about once a week in the ‘no-fly’ zones. These hearings add more layers of myth instead of unraveling them.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

CHARLIE CRAY
Cray is director of the Campaign for Corporate Reform for the group Citizen Works.
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VIRGINIA RASMUSSEN
Rasmussen, who works with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, wrote the article \”Rethinking the Corporation.\” She said today: \”The legislation signed by Mr. Bush today is a quickly-devised effort to send a message that the people are \’winning,\’ when, in fact, nothing of the sort has happened…. A law establishing oversight and imposing a few penalties we are told will set things right and get corporations in line, but will in fact leave the giant corporations and their complicit governments to proceed with business as usual. Such speedy acting is intended to divert us from the fundamental question of who governs in this country…. We need to be rewriting corporate law in all 50 states and engaging in the struggle to build democratic institutions that put the people in charge.\”
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DAPHNE WYSHAM
Co-author of \”Enron\’s Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enron\’s Globalization Game,\” Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. She said today: \”Long before Enron\’s tricks came to light in the U.S., the company was infamous for even more egregious practices in the developing world…. Our research has uncovered that 21 agencies representing the U.S. government, multilateral development banks, and other national governments helped leverage Enron\’s global reach with $7.2 billion in public financing approved for 38 projects in 29 countries. Enron\’s overseas operations rewarded shareholders temporarily, but often punished the people and governments of foreign countries with price hikes and blackouts worse than what California suffered in 2001, causing social unrest and riots that were sometimes brutally repressed. Meanwhile, the U.S. government and other public agencies continued to advocate on Enron\’s behalf, threatening poor countries — for example Mozambique was threatened with an end to aid if it did not accept Enron\’s bid on a natural gas field. Only when Enron\’s scandals began to affect Americans did these officials and institutions hold the corporation at arm\’s length.\”
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JEFF CHESTER
Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, testified before the Senate on Tuesday. Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and co-author of the recent article \”A 12-Step Program for Media Democracy.\” Chester said today: \”The FCC\’s recently released five-year plan does not even mention the \’public interest\’ — something that should be central to its role.\”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to hold hearings on U.S. policy toward Iraq beginning Wednesday. Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck are available for interviews:

SCOTT RITTER
Ritter, who was a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, is the author of Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem Once and For All. He said this afternoon: “Sen. Joe Biden is running a sham hearing. It is clear that Biden and most of the Congressional leadership have pre-ordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts, and are using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq. These hearings have nothing to do with an objective search for the truth, but rather seek to line up like-minded witnesses who will buttress this pre-determined result…. This isn’t American democracy in action, it’s the failure of American democracy. Before we go to war with Iraq, we must be able to determine that Iraq poses a threat to the national security of the United States. Such a determination must be backed up with substantive fact. I believe that Iraq does not pose a threat to the U.S. worthy of war. This conclusion is shared by many senior military officers. According to President Bush and his advisers, Iraq is known to possess weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to reconstitute the weapons production capabilities. I bear personal witness, through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the UN, to both the scope of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them. While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq’s proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. These are the sort of facts that must be included in any hearing that seeks to determine the threat posed by Iraq today. It is clear that Sen. Biden and his colleagues have no interest in such facts.”
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HANS VON SPONECK
As a former UN Assistant Secretary General, Von Sponeck headed the UN “oil-for-food” program until he resigned two years ago in protest over the continued sanctions on Iraq. He was in Iraq two weeks ago, visited sites purported to be weapons sites and found them to be “defunct and destroyed.” He said this afternoon: “Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist…. Six years of revisions to sanctions policy on Baghdad have repeatedly promised ‘mitigation’ of civilian suffering. Yet, in 1999, UNICEF confirmed an estimated 5,000 excess child deaths every month above the 1989 pre-sanctions rate. Four months ago, UNICEF reported that more than 22 per cent of the country’s young children remain chronically malnourished. Credible opposition groups outside Iraq have called for delinking economic and military sanctions. At the March Arab summit in Beirut, all 22 Arab governments (including Kuwait) called for the same. If the economic embargo on Iraq is not in their interest, then in whose interest is it?”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; Norman Solomon, (415) 552-5378

TOM SCHLESINGER
Executive director of the Financial Markets Center, Schlesinger said today: “New information about the role of large financial holding companies in the Enron debacle raises questions about the effects of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), a 1999 law that completed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and permitted firms like Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase to combine banking, securities and insurance operations under one roof. The dealings between Enron and its banks also highlight another key question: Where were the regulators? This question applies most directly to the Federal Reserve, which received umbrella supervision authority over all financial holding company activities under GLBA.” The Financial Markets Center web site — www.fmcenter.org/pdf/dec99.pdf — contains an overall critique of GLBA written at the time President Clinton signed the law. Also see: www.fmcenter.org/fmc_superpage.asp?ID=245, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR102699.htm
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ROBERT POLLIN
Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of the forthcoming book Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity, Pollin said today: “The fraud and accounting scandals are not the cause of the financial crisis, but rather a consequence of it. No one seemed to care about loose accounting practices as long as the stock market was going up. Only when investors realized that stock prices were not going to continue to go up, and they had to rely on earnings, did it become apparent that the earnings were simply not there. The stock prices were at historical highs at the end of the 1990s, even if the bogus profit numbers had been true. Historically, the average price-earnings ratio is about 15:1. In 1999, it was about 42:1 based on companies’ reported earnings. One of the major factors in driving the bubble was the deregulation of financial markets. For example, Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, presided over the deregulation of the banking industry. Now he’s heading up Citicorp. The type of fraudulent activity that corporate leaders have engaged in would clearly have been far more difficult within a reasonably functioning regulatory environment.”

KAREN FRIEDMAN
Director of policy strategies at the Pension Rights Center, Friedman said today: “It’s crucial that any legislation on 401(k)s do the following: limit over-concentration of employer stock in 401(k) plans; hold company officials accountable for their unlawful actions; require worker representation on 401(k) plan boards of trustees; assure that 401(k) trustees are insured if a court finds that they acted unlawfully; and provide whistle-blower protection for employees who protest unlawful 401(k) actions….”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

ELLEN FRANK
Professor of economics at Emmanuel College in Boston and author of the forthcoming book Money Illusions, Frank said today: “For the last 10 years or so, the broad public has been encouraged, mostly because of 401(k) plans, to regard the stock market as a safe place to invest retirement funds and obtain consistently high, if occasionally volatile, returns. Small investors have been led to believe that a buy-and-hold strategy will yield a certain 7 percent return, when it almost certainly will not. Stock prices have risen faster than the economy, than sales, than corporate profits. This simply can’t continue. Insiders have been bailing out, leaving small investors to suffer the losses. What the U.S. government should be doing is developing retirement programs that are safe, secure, stable and not dependent on stock returns. The decline is of course a compelling argument against Social Security privatization.”

DEAN BAKER
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the article “The Costs of the Stock Market Bubble,” Baker said today: “The 1998-to-2000 stock bubble was completely transparent to any economist or analyst who looked at it seriously. The public has every right to be scared about our political and economic leadership.”
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DOUG DOWD
Dowd is author of the book Understanding Capitalism and the article “The New Economy: Stairway to the Stars or House of Cards?” He said today: “The stock market now is playing very much the same role it did in the late ’20s; it got very seriously inflated then as it did the last five or six years. It’s largely driven by euphoria. What has been keeping the economy going is debt — household debt and international debt. The debt has to continue to rise for the economy to continue its course, but the debt can’t continue to rise indefinitely. So much has been based on borrowing, borrowing, borrowing. It’s likely that there will not be a panic just in the market, but throughout the economy.”
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ROBIN HAHNEL
Professor of economics at American University, Hahnel is author of Panic Rules! Everything You Need to Know About the Global Economy and the forthcoming The ABC’s of Political Economy. He said today: “The essential problem is that we’ve tied the real economy of production and consumption — which is what most of us care about — ever more tightly to the fortunes of the financial sector that has been made much more volatile and crisis-prone by liberalization and deregulation of financial markets. While changes in the financial sector have provided new opportunities for speculators to increase their wealth, the increased fragility of the financial sector does great damage to the real economy. The depression in East Asia that followed the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 was one poignant example…. The problem is clearly not just evil CEOs; the regulatory framework dating back to the New Deal has been scuttled….”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

JIM VALLETTE
Coauthor of the report “Halliburton’s Destructive Engagement” and consultant to EarthRights International, Vallette said today: “Newsweek reported yesterday that the current CEO of Halliburton asserts that Cheney knew of the accounting practices of the company employed during Cheney’s tenure as CEO — the practices that are now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Halliburton is also a corporate welfare king, a major beneficiary of government aid toward fossil fuel industry projects in developing countries — to the tune of at least $6 billion in government aid packages since 1992. Newsweek reports that Halliburton fell from $54.02 a share when Cheney left the company in 2000 to $13.52 last week, leaving Cheney $26 million richer than had he not cashed in then…. Cheney’s Halliburton also profited enormously from projects around the world that have been widely condemned for horrendous human rights abuses and massive environmental destruction. The numerous examples include doing business with the notorious Yadana pipeline project in Burma — an environmentally damaging project on behalf of which, according to a U.S. federal court, egregious human rights abuses were committed, including murder, torture, rape, forced labor and forced relocation.”
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PRATAP CHATTERJEE
Author of the article “Dick Cheney: Soldier of Fortune,” Chatterjee said today: “Cheney made a fortune of almost $30 million in just two years in the oil industry when he took over as chief executive of Halliburton — a fortune for a man with no previous experience in running a company, let alone an oil multinational. Cheney came with even better qualifications; he was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War and worked in the Washington scene for 25 years before he took the job with Halliburton. He brought with him a trusty Rolodex and his former chief of staff, David Gribbin, as chief lobbyist. In the last two years of their tenure, the pair notched up $1.5 billion in federal loans and insurance subsidies for Halliburton, compared to the paltry $100 million that the company received in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival. In addition, the company garnered $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts in that time, or almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before he arrived.”
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DOUG HENWOOD
Author of the book Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, Henwood said today: “Though Greenspan is noted for his inscrutability, you could have predicted what he said this morning: the economy is getting better, but risks remain; our financial and economic structures are wondrously flexible, but they’ve got some problems; … we need some new regulation, but not too much. He took note of recent corporate scandals — but forgot to mention that they developed under his watch, along with one of the great speculative bubbles of all time. And not only did he tolerate that, he even promoted it, by endorsing all the New Economy nonsense that was its intellectual justification. Nor did he say a word about the Fed’s internal worries that we’re facing a domestic replay of Japan’s long post-bubble slump — but that’s one reason the Fed is keeping interest rates so low for so long.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167